OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Marine Mammal Species Classification using Convolutional Neural Networks and a Novel Acoustic Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2019
Year: 2019

Research into automated systems for detecting and classifying marine mammals in acoustic recordings is expanding internationally due to the necessity to analyze large collections of data for conservation purposes. In this work, we present a Convolutional Neural Network that is capable of classifying the vocalizations of three species of whales, non-biological sources of noise, and a fifth class pertaining to ambient noise. In this way, the classifier is capable of detecting the presence and absence of whale vocalizations in an acoustic recording. Through transfer learning, we show that the classifier is capable of learning high-level representations and can generalize to additional species. We also propose a novel representation of acoustic signals that builds upon the commonly used spectrogram representation by way of interpolating and stacking multiple spectrograms produced using different Short-time Fourier Transform (STFT) parameters. The proposed representation is particularly effective for the task of marine mammal species classification where the acoustic events we are attempting to classify are sensitive to the parameters of the STFT.
Wasserstein Robust Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Reinforcement learning algorithms, though successful, tend to over-fit to training environments hampering their application to the real-world. This paper proposes $\text{W}\text{R}^{2}\text{L}$ -- a robust reinforcement learning algorithm with significant robust performance on low and high-dimensional control tasks. Our method formalises robust reinforcement learning as a novel min-max game with a Wasserstein constraint for a correct and convergent solver. Apart from the formulation, we also propose an efficient and scalable solver following a novel zero-order optimisation method that we believe can be useful to numerical optimisation in general. We empirically demonstrate significant gains compared to standard and robust state-of-the-art algorithms on high-dimensional MuJuCo environments.
Distributed Streaming Analytics on Large-scale Oceanographic Data using Apache Spark
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Real-world data from diverse domains require real-time scalable analysis. Large-scale data processing frameworks or engines such as Hadoop fall short when results are needed on-the-fly. Apache Spark's streaming library is increasingly becoming a popular choice as it can stream and analyze a significant amount of data. In this paper, we analyze large-scale geo-temporal data collected from the USGODAE (United States Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment) data catalog, and showcase and assess the ability of Spark stream processing. We measure the latency of streaming and monitor scalability by adding and removing nodes in the middle of a streaming job. We also verify the fault tolerance by stopping nodes in the middle of a job and making sure that the job is rescheduled and completed on other nodes. We design a full-stack application that automates data collection, data processing and visualizing the results. We also use Google Maps API to visualize results by color coding the world map with values from various analytics.
Wireless Networked Control Systems with Coding-Free Data Transmission for Industrial IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

Wireless networked control systems for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) require low latency communication techniques that are very reliable and resilient. In this paper, we investigate a coding-free control method to achieve ultra-low latency communications in single-controller-multi-plant networked control systems for both slow and fast fading channels. We formulate a power allocation problem to optimize the sum cost functions of multiple plants, subject to the plant stabilization condition and the controller's power limit. Although the optimization problem is a non-convex one, we derive a closed-form solution, which indicates that the optimal power allocation policy for stabilizing the plants with different channel conditions is reminiscent of the channel-inversion policy. We numerically compare the performance of the proposed coding-free control method and the conventional coding-based control methods in terms of the control performance (i.e., the cost function) of a plant, which shows that the coding-free method is superior in a practical range of SNRs.
The Validity, Generalizability and Feasibility of Summative Evaluation Methods in Visual Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Many evaluation methods have been used to assess the usefulness of Visual Analytics (VA) solutions. These methods stem from a variety of origins with different assumptions and goals, which cause confusion about their proofing capabilities. Moreover, the lack of discussion about the evaluation processes may limit our potential to develop new evaluation methods specialized for VA. In this paper, we present an analysis of evaluation methods that have been used to summatively evaluate VA solutions. We provide a survey and taxonomy of the evaluation methods that have appeared in the VAST literature in the past two years. We then analyze these methods in terms of validity and generalizability of their findings, as well as the feasibility of using them. We propose a new metric called summative quality to compare evaluation methods according to their ability to prove usefulness, and make recommendations for selecting evaluation methods based on their summative quality in the VA domain.
A Novel Multiple Classifier Generation and Combination Framework Based on Fuzzy Clustering and Individualized Ensemble Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Multiple classifier system (MCS) has become a successful alternative for improving classification performance. However, studies have shown inconsistent results for different MCSs, and it is often difficult to predict which MCS algorithm works the best on a particular problem. We believe that the two crucial steps of MCS - base classifier generation and multiple classifier combination, need to be designed coordinately to produce robust results. In this work, we show that for different testing instances, better classifiers may be trained from different subdomains of training instances including, for example, neighboring instances of the testing instance, or even instances far away from the testing instance. To utilize this intuition, we propose Individualized Classifier Ensemble (ICE). ICE groups training data into overlapping clusters, builds a classifier for each cluster, and then associates each training instance to the top-performing models while taking into account model types and frequency. In testing, ICE finds the k most similar training instances for a testing instance, then predicts class label of the testing instance by averaging the prediction from models associated with these training instances. Evaluation results on 49 benchmarks show that ICE has a stable improvement on a significant proportion of datasets over existing MCS methods. ICE provides a novel choice of utilizing internal patterns among instances to improve classification, and can be easily combined with various classification models and applied to many application domains.
Towards Digital Retina in Smart Cities: A Model Generation, Utilization and Communication Paradigm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The digital retina in smart cities is to select what the City Eye tells the City Brain, and convert the acquired visual data from front-end visual sensors to features in an intelligent sensing manner. By deploying deep learning and/or handcrafted models in front-end devices, the compact features can be extracted and subsequently delivered to back-end cloud for search and advanced analytics. In this context, we propose a model generation, utilization, and communication paradigm, aiming to address a set of unique challenges for better artificial intelligence services in smart cities. In particular, we present an integrated multiple deep learning models reuse and prediction strategy, which greatly increases the feasibility of the digital retina in processing and analyzing the large-scale visual data in smart cities. The promise of the proposed paradigm is demonstrated through a set of experiments.
Incremental Learning Techniques for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep learning architectures exhibit a critical drop of performance due to catastrophic forgetting when they are required to incrementally learn new tasks. Contemporary incremental learning frameworks focus on image classification and object detection while in this work we formally introduce the incremental learning problem for semantic segmentation in which a pixel-wise labeling is considered. To tackle this task we propose to distill the knowledge of the previous model to retain the information about previously learned classes, whilst updating the current model to learn the new ones. We propose various approaches working both on the output logits and on intermediate features. In opposition to some recent frameworks, we do not store any image from previously learned classes and only the last model is needed to preserve high accuracy on these classes. The experimental evaluation on the Pascal VOC2012 dataset shows the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
Trajectory Advancement during Human-Robot Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

As technology advances, the barriers between the co-existence of humans and robots are slowly coming down. The prominence of physical interactions for collaboration and cooperation between humans and robots will be an undeniable fact. Rather than exhibiting simple reactive behaviors to human interactions, it is desirable to endow robots with augmented capabilities of exploiting human interactions for successful task completion. Towards that goal, in this paper, we propose a trajectory advancement approach in which we mathematically derive the conditions that facilitate advancing along a reference trajectory by leveraging assistance from helpful interaction wrench present during human-robot collaboration. We validate our approach through experiments conducted with the iCub humanoid robot both in simulation and on the real robot.
An Efficient and Scalable Privacy Preserving Algorithm for Big Data and Data Streams
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

A vast amount of valuable data is produced and is becoming available for analysis as a result of advancements in smart cyber-physical systems. The data comes from various sources, such as healthcare, smart homes, smart vehicles, and often includes private, potentially sensitive information that needs appropriate sanitization before being released for analysis. The incremental and fast nature of data generation in these systems necessitates scalable privacy-preserving mechanisms with high privacy and utility. However, privacy preservation often comes at the expense of data utility. We propose a new data perturbation algorithm, SEAL (Secure and Efficient data perturbation Algorithm utilizing Local differential privacy), based on Chebyshev interpolation and Laplacian noise, which provides a good balance between privacy and utility with high efficiency and scalability. Empirical comparisons with existing privacy-preserving algorithms show that SEAL excels in execution speed, scalability, accuracy, and attack resistance. SEAL provides flexibility in choosing the best possible privacy parameters, such as the amount of added noise, which can be tailored to the domain and dataset.
Privately Answering Classification Queries in the Agnostic PAC Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We revisit the problem of differentially private release of classification queries. In this problem, the goal is to design an algorithm that can accurately answer a sequence of classification queries based on a private training set while ensuring differential privacy. We formally study this problem in the agnostic PAC model and derive a new upper bound on the private sample complexity. Our results improve over those obtained in a recent work [BTT18] for the agnostic PAC setting. In particular, we give an improved construction that yields a tighter upper bound on the sample complexity. Moreover, unlike [BTT18], our accuracy guarantee does not involve any blow-up in the approximation error associated with the given hypothesis class. Given any hypothesis class with VC-dimension $d$, we show that our construction can privately answer up to $m$ classification queries with average excess error $α$ using a private sample of size $\approx \frac{d}{α^2}\,\max\left(1, \sqrt{m}\,α^{3/2}\right)$. Using recent results on private learning with auxiliary public data, we extend our construction to show that one can privately answer any number of classification queries with average excess error $α$ using a private sample of size $\approx \frac{d}{α^2}\,\max\left(1, \sqrt{d}\,α\right)$. When $α=O\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{d}}\right)$, our private sample complexity bound is essentially optimal.
Deploying a Top-100 Supercomputer for Large Parallel Workloads: the Niagara Supercomputer
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Niagara is currently the fastest supercomputer accessible to academics in Canada. It was deployed at the beginning of 2018 and has been serving the research community ever since. This homogeneous 60,000-core cluster, owned by the University of Toronto and operated by SciNet, was intended to enable large parallel jobs and has a measured performance of 3.02 petaflops, debuting at #53 in the June 2018 TOP500 list. It was designed to optimize throughput of a range of scientific codes running at scale, energy efficiency, and network and storage performance and capacity. It replaced two systems that SciNet operated for over 8 years, the Tightly Coupled System (TCS) and the General Purpose Cluster (GPC). In this paper we describe the transition process from these two systems, the procurement and deployment processes, as well as the unique features that make Niagara a one-of-a-kind machine in Canada.
MetricsVis: A Visual Analytics System for Evaluating Employee Performance in Public Safety Agencies
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Evaluating employee performance in organizations with varying workloads and tasks is challenging. Specifically, it is important to understand how quantitative measurements of employee achievements relate to supervisor expectations, what the main drivers of good performance are, and how to combine these complex and flexible performance evaluation metrics into an accurate portrayal of organizational performance in order to identify shortcomings and improve overall productivity. To facilitate this process, we summarize common organizational performance analyses into four visual exploration task categories. Additionally, we develop MetricsVis, a visual analytics system composed of multiple coordinated views to support the dynamic evaluation and comparison of individual, team, and organizational performance in public safety organizations. MetricsVis provides four primary visual components to expedite performance evaluation: (1) a priority adjustment view to support direct manipulation on evaluation metrics; (2) a reorderable performance matrix to demonstrate the details of individual employees; (3) a group performance view that highlights aggregate performance and individual contributions for each group; and (4) a projection view illustrating employees with similar specialties to facilitate shift assignments and training. We demonstrate the usability of our framework with two case studies from medium-sized law enforcement agencies and highlight its broader applicability to other domains.
explAIner: A Visual Analytics Framework for Interactive and Explainable Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a framework for interactive and explainable machine learning that enables users to (1) understand machine learning models; (2) diagnose model limitations using different explainable AI methods; as well as (3) refine and optimize the models. Our framework combines an iterative XAI pipeline with eight global monitoring and steering mechanisms, including quality monitoring, provenance tracking, model comparison, and trust building. To operationalize the framework, we present explAIner, a visual analytics system for interactive and explainable machine learning that instantiates all phases of the suggested pipeline within the commonly used TensorBoard environment. We performed a user-study with nine participants across different expertise levels to examine their perception of our workflow and to collect suggestions to fill the gap between our system and framework. The evaluation confirms that our tightly integrated system leads to an informed machine learning process while disclosing opportunities for further extensions.
Tracy: A Business-driven Technical Debt Prioritization Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

Technical debt is a pervasive problem in software development. Software development teams have to prioritize debt items and determine whether they should address debt or develop new features at any point in time. This paper presents "Tracy", a framework for the prioritization of technical debt using a business-driven approach built on top of business processes. The current stage of the proposed framework is at the beginning of the third phase of Design Science Research, which is usually divided into the phases of exploration, engineering, and evaluation. The exploration and engineering phases involved the participation of 49 professionals from 12 different groups of three companies. The initial evaluation shows that the presented framework is coherent in its structure and that its results contribute to business-driven decision making on technical debt prioritization.
Generalized Fault-Tolerance Topology Generation for Application Specific Network-on-Chips
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2019
Year: 2019

The Network-on-Chips is a promising candidate for addressing communication bottlenecks in many-core processors and neural network processors. In this work, we consider the generalized fault-tolerance topology generation problem, where the link or switch failures can happen, for application-specific network-on-chips (ASNoC). With a user-defined number, K, we propose an integer linear programming (ILP) based method to generate ASNoC topologies, which can tolerate at most K faults in switches or links. Given the communication requirements between cores and their floorplan, we first propose a convex-cost-flow based method to solve a core mapping problem for building connections between the cores and switches. Second, an ILP based method is proposed to allocate K+1 switch-disjoint routing paths for every communication flow between the cores. Finally, to reduce switch sizes, we propose sharing the switch ports for the connections between the cores and switches and formulate the port sharing problem as a clique-partitioning problem Additionally, we propose an ILP-based method to simultaneously solve the core mapping and routing path allocation problems when considering physical link failures only. Experimental results show that the power consumptions of fault-tolerance topologies increase almost linearly with K because of the routing path redundancy. When both switch faults and link faults are considered, port sharing can reduce the average power consumption of fault-tolerance topologies with K = 1, K = 2 and K = 3 by 18.08%, 28.88%, and 34.20%, respectively. When considering only the physical link faults, the experimental results show that compared to the FTTG algorithm, the proposed method reduces power consumption and hop count by 10.58% and 6.25%, respectively; compared to the DBG based method, the proposed method reduces power consumption and hop count by 21.72% and 9.35%, respectively.
Curiosity-driven Reinforcement Learning for Diverse Visual Paragraph Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Visual paragraph generation aims to automatically describe a given image from different perspectives and organize sentences in a coherent way. In this paper, we address three critical challenges for this task in a reinforcement learning setting: the mode collapse, the delayed feedback, and the time-consuming warm-up for policy networks. Generally, we propose a novel Curiosity-driven Reinforcement Learning (CRL) framework to jointly enhance the diversity and accuracy of the generated paragraphs. First, by modeling the paragraph captioning as a long-term decision-making process and measuring the prediction uncertainty of state transitions as intrinsic rewards, the model is incentivized to memorize precise but rarely spotted descriptions to context, rather than being biased towards frequent fragments and generic patterns. Second, since the extrinsic reward from evaluation is only available until the complete paragraph is generated, we estimate its expected value at each time step with temporal-difference learning, by considering the correlations between successive actions. Then the estimated extrinsic rewards are complemented by dense intrinsic rewards produced from the derived curiosity module, in order to encourage the policy to fully explore action space and find a global optimum. Third, discounted imitation learning is integrated for learning from human demonstrations, without separately performing the time-consuming warm-up in advance. Extensive experiments conducted on the Standford image-paragraph dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, improving the performance by 38.4% compared with state-of-the-art.
Graph Neural Networks for Small Graph and Giant Network Representation Learning: An Overview
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Graph neural networks denote a group of neural network models introduced for the representation learning tasks on graph data specifically. Graph neural networks have been demonstrated to be effective for capturing network structure information, and the learned representations can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on node and graph classification tasks. Besides the different application scenarios, the architectures of graph neural network models also depend on the studied graph types a lot. Graph data studied in research can be generally categorized into two main types, i.e., small graphs vs. giant networks, which differ from each other a lot in the size, instance number and label annotation. Several different types of graph neural network models have been introduced for learning the representations from such different types of graphs already. In this paper, for these two different types of graph data, we will introduce the graph neural networks introduced in recent years. To be more specific, the graph neural networks introduced in this paper include IsoNN, SDBN, LF&ER, GCN, GAT, DifNN, GNL, GraphSage and seGEN. Among these graph neural network models, IsoNN, SDBN and LF&ER are initially proposed for small graphs and the remaining ones are initially proposed for giant networks instead. The readers are also suggested to refer to these papers for detailed information when reading this tutorial paper.